the embers of the conflagration now
kindling in the West, while religious toleration extinguishes the
smoldering fires of popular insurrection. Henceforth, there is an end
to civil war.[3105] Regiments ready to act in harmony with the
military commissions[3106] purge the South and the valley of the Rhone;
thenceforth, there are no more roving bands in the rural districts,
while brigandage on a grand scale, constantly repressed, ceases, and
after this, that on a small scale. No more chouans, chauffeurs, or
barbets;[3107] The mail-coach travels without a guard, and the highways
are safe.[3108] There is longer any class or category of citizens
oppressed or excluded from the common law, the latest Jacobin decrees
and the forced loan have been at once revoked: noble or plebeian,
ecclesiastic or layman, rich or poor, former emigre or former terrorist,
every man, whatever his past, his condition, or his opinions, now enjoys
his private property and his legal rights; he has no longer to fear the
violence of the opposite party; he may relay on the protection of the
authorities,[3109] and on the equity of the magistrates.[3110] So long
as he respects the law he can go to bed at night and sleep tranquilly
with the certainty of awaking in freedom on the morrow, and with the
certainty of doing as he pleases the entire day; with the privilege of
working, buying, selling, thinking, amusing himself,[3111] going and
coming at his pleasure, and especially of going to mass or of staying
away if he chooses. No more jacqueries either rural or urban, no more
proscriptions or persecutions and legal or illegal spoliations, no
more intestine and social wars waged with pikes or by decrees, no more
conquests and confiscations made by Frenchmen against each other. With
universal and unutterable relief people emerge from the barbarous and
anarchical regime which reduced them to living from one day to another,
and return to the pacific and regular regime which permits them to count
on the morrow and make provision for it. After ten years of harassing
subjection to the incoherent absolutism of unstable despotism, here,
for the first time, they find a rational and stable government, or, at
least, a reasonable, tolerable, and fixed degree of it. The First
Consul is carrying out his declarations and he has declared that "The
Revolution has ended."[3112]

III. Return of the Emigres.

Lasting effect of revolutionary laws.--Condition of the